


A Lord’s Tail

by SquashMonster



Series: Applied Herpetology [1]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: All is well in the end, Angst, Anxiety, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Bouquet - Freeform, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, It grows back, M/M, Multi, Pet Names, also they just really love each other, also they're married, and well, but then it became angst, he's a lizard, herpetology, parietal eye, so lizards do this thing, tail dropping, then it went back to fluff, this was going to be fluff, yes all three of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 11:49:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18072875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquashMonster/pseuds/SquashMonster
Summary: Even the mighty Lord Arum must sometimes make sacrifices to return home. In which Arum is very much a lizard, Damien finds his tranquility, and Rilla loses her cool.





	A Lord’s Tail

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, so this fic was inspired by some of the weird things which lizards are capable of doing with their bodies, many of which would surely freak out a human, no matter how comfortable with reptile morphology they are (if ya know what I'm sayin' *eyebrow wiggle*). It was also sort of inevitable that my herpetology background would come up when writing Bouquet fic. Content warning for some blood and gore.

“Saint Damien above!” The knight springs to his feet, terror pulsing through every vein. _No, no, not after all it took to get here, not after all the fighting and the fear and the talking and--_

Amidst the Keep’s concerned trilling, Arum falls through its portal with a thump, his bloodstained body shaking in a labored rattle. His eyes flicker towards Damien before closing weakly as the human surges towards him. Forgotten poetry pages scatter in Damien's wake.

“Saints, Arum, no, my lily, my dear--” Damien’s hands shake as he strokes them over the several mud-caked gashes which ooze from the lizard’s face. A portion of frill hangs in tatters around Arum’s neck, leaking red. Damien can feel panic begin to quiver throughout his chest, threatening to overwhelm him with more shakes and whimpers. _Saint Damien, no, not now. The river, be like the river. Saint, please, your tranquility._ “My lily, m-my heart--” he pauses, breathes deeply in through his nose. “My Arum, I beg of you, do not die, I could not bear it.” _Tranquility, tranquility..._

A reptilian eye blinks open to gaze into Damien’s tear-streaked face. “Honeysuckle,” he rasps. “You are being--” a pained rattle. “Stupid. Humans, you and your--” another rattle “fragility. Is Amaryllis here? Keep--” his words cease as a spasm of pain racks his body, bristling his scales and ruffling his mangled frill. The Keep springs to life, reaching a concerned tendril to its’ creation’s face alongside Damien’s stroking hands. Moments after a high-pitched trilling fills the air, Rilla races into the room.

“What’s going on? Damien, Arum? Oh, Saints, Arum!” She joins her husbands on the floor. “What happened?” As she asks, her hands are already probing the lizard’s wounds and reaching gently beneath his frill to check his pulse. When she reaches his lower back, she stiffens. “Arum, your tail…”

The lord of the swamp groans as he reaches a hand toward each of his spouses. “Dropped it. Got away.”

In horror, Damien tears his eyes away from Arum’s face and towards his lower body. Where once sprung a mighty tail, which could move with such powerful grace that Damien had compared it more than once to a dancer, only a bloodied stump now remains. Nausea rises through Damien’s body as a hint of an exposed vertebra catches his eye from within the clots of blood and muck coating his beloved’s body.

Rilla simply nods briefly. “Keep, get me something to clean him up and my medical kit.” It obliges almost instantly, humming all the while. In the time since he and Rilla moved to the Swamp of Titan’s Blooms, Damien has learned to recognize meaning from some of their home’s songs. This one reverberates with tenderness, though Damien can pick out a powerful thread of worry running beneath its comforting tones.

Between the two humans and the Keep’s assisting tendrils, they manage to gently wipe away the worst of the mud which coats Arum’s scales. Every so often, he rattles at his three nurses not to fuss, but his words are more often than not cut short by more of the painful spasms which wrack his frame and prevent any more explanation of what happened. Once he is rid of mud, it becomes clear that the worst damage was to his frill and tail. Rilla smears both with a thick herbaceous salve before bandaging the tail stump. However, even with his major wounds tended, Arum remains shaken by convulsions every few moments. Each leaves him more exhausted than the last, until he can barely gasp wordlessly in between them.

“Rilla, my love, what is happening to him? Oh, lily, my dear...” Damien’s hands, idle again now that he has finished wiping at Arum’s wounds, have come to rest on either side of his reptilian beloved’s face. His thumbs stroke the scales beneath them in an effort to soothe, though they still shake with Damien’s own anxiety.

“It looks like muscle spasms. I might have something for it, but I’ve never given it to anyone other than Sir Marc--shh, shh, love, shh.” Her thought fades quickly into gentle comforting noises as Arum twists yet again in pain. “But we’re going to try. He’s just going to hurt himself more like this. Keep, the third bottle on the left of the second shelf in my workshop? Oh, Saints...”

Rilla shakes a small amount of fine golden powder from the bottle which the Keep deposits in her hand. “Alright, Arum, you’re going to be ok. Just breathe, alright?” And then she leans down, places her hand next to his nose, and blows.

The medicine works almost instantly. One moment, Arum is sneezing in surprise at the dust entering his sinuses, the next he has slumped in relief against his spouses as the last of his spasms ebb.

“Amaryllis... Honeysuckle…” he rattles a weak sound of gratitude at them. “I told you...I was...alright.”

 

***

 

Without the muscle spasms keeping him on edge, Arum sinks quickly into a deep sleep. Rilla checks and double-checks to make sure he isn’t reacting adversely to the medication, which Damien notes she does without any hint of scientific note-taking. Even though she does not mirror the knight’s pacing and absent picking at his fingertips, he can see that she is just as nervous as him. He has never seen her like this, although it occurs to him her recordings have been extremely sparse when she’s treated him for a major injury.

As Rilla pulls back from checking on Arum yet again, Damien halts in his pacing to draw her into an embrace. This close, he can feel a faint tremor running through her body, though her hands remain steady out of necessity. _Saint Damien, please, the tranquility to be there for her._ Damien inhales, focusing on his breath and the warmth of his wife to keep his panic at bay. She leans into his touch, relaxing slightly as her head comes to rest against him. After a moment, a choked sob escapes her.

“I’m not supposed to be like this,” she mumbles into his shoulder, almost inaudible.

“Like what, my love?”

“Scared. Shaking. Incompetent.” She lifts her head from his shoulder and sniffs once, hard. “I’m supposed to take care of you two, not risk your lives with unpredictable medicines that might have who-knows-what effect on someone like him. Damien, I panicked. I hid it really, really well. But I don’t know what that’s going to do to him! What if he never wakes up? Saints, now _you’re_ comforting me! And he’s just asleep, and he’s still so hurt, and I’ve never seen him like that and, and--”

Damien has never been on this end of an anxiety attack with Rilla. Saints, he wasn’t even fully aware that she was capable of such a thing. Yet he knows from years of experience how to exaggerate his breathing, how to stroke her back in slow motions, and how to gently murmur comforts to ease her back to calm. After all, he’s been on the receiving end of these ministrations more times than he cares to admit.

“My love, you did marvelously. Why, they could tell tales of your quick thinking, your steady hands, your strength as you helped our mighty friend lizard to his bed. ‘Amaryllis, herbalist of the Swamp of Titan’s Blooms, healer of monsters, as talented as she is beautiful, as wise as she is brave!’ Oh, forever flower, hush, it is ok. Yes, you may cry on me, there is no shame. Of course you were frightened, as was I. That does not make you less brave, less cunning. And it worked, did it not? You have saved our love, our Arum lily, and he now lies resting. Come, sit with me a moment. See? We shall still be here next to him, should he need us.” He presses a kiss to her hair. “Oh, my dear Rilla, you have been there for me so many times, let me be there for you now.”

They rest like that, Rilla sniffling softly in Damien’s lap as he leans against the couch on which Arum is draped. Slowly, the shaking in her shoulders eases until she sits quietly nestled into the knight’s chest. Every so often, he glances over at their husband to reassure himself and Rilla that the lizard still breathes normally. Gently, Damien moves one of his hands from Rilla’s back to rest on a scaly knee.

At his touch, Arum stirs slightly. He breathes a soft rattle as an eye blinks open to look blearily down at where his loves sit huddled next to him. “Amaryllis, you are crying,” he croaks.

She sits up with a jolt. “Arum! You’re awake!” She dashes the tears from her cheeks. “Yes, I suppose I was. What in the Saints’ names do you have to say for yourself? You scared us both nearly to death! Why, if you hadn’t nearly died, I swear I’d--”

Arum laughs, then winces as the motion shakes his salve-smeared frill. “And yet, here you are, next to me. Thank you both. I assure you, this was not my plan when I encountered that roc. It appears I attempted to give a bit more of myself in my escape than was wise.”

“The roc--?” Damien stands and helps Rilla to her feet before settling on Arum’s couch. He takes one of the lizard’s hands in his own, turning it delicately to inspect a line of scratched scales which run along the palm. Rilla catches another of his hands in hers and brings in to her lips. Relief positively glows from her at seeing him speaking.

“I was gathering specimens in the far wastes when it swooped down out of the sky after me. Pah, I don’t know what code of law it was following, but it certainly was not obeying my right to my freedom. I had to drop my tail to get away from the damned beast.” He glances at his stump in dismay. “It will take me _years_ to grow back another. And it will look so, so _ridiculous_.”

“But the muscle spasms, why were those happening?” Scientist Rilla returns quickly as she pulls a notebook from her skirt pocket and begins jotting notes. “Wait, you say your tail will grow back?”

“I must have released it too far up, and made the rest of my body respond. Sort of a deliberate, hmm, spasm. Yes.” He rattles, eyes narrowing in thought. “Quite unpleasant. And yes, it will regrow. Though I had hoped neither of you would ever see me like this. It is...distasteful.” Less groggy now, he has recovered the stamina to sit up on the couch and begin to sound peeved with the state of his body. His annoyance only grows when he attempts to stand, but sinks back to the couch before he has even managed to take two steps. “Someone help me to some food. I am always starving after I drop, and I may take a bite of the Keep if I do not have something soon.” The answering song sounds as though it is meant to chastise, but even that cannot mask their home’s relief.

 

***

 

Arum spends the next few days curled in bed after sulkily accepting his bodily need for rest. The combination of fighting, deliberately losing a limb, and his spell of muscle spasms has drained him of all energy but that required for eating and complaining. Damien and Rilla take turns showering him with food and tending to the many small wounds left by the roc. When neither of them is running errands or fussing about the kitchen, they also take to lying on either side of their partner, telling stories to distract him from his bedridden condition. Damien recites poetry, and Rilla recounts some of her more colorful tales from tending her many patients.

“Although I can assure you,” she says, rolling onto her side to face both men she shares the bed with. “That this may be the most outlandish story of someone in my care yet. My monstrous spouse, who _voluntarily_ opted to rid himself of an essential body part--”

“Now, Amaryllis, I merely did so to preserve my life. Have you not seen other smaller creatures of my nature do such a thing?” He brushes a stray bit of hair out of Rilla’s eyes as he pulls Damien closer to his chest.

“Yes, I have. But, as you might have noticed, you are not a two-inch garden skink!” Rilla bristles, though she also leans closer into Arum’s touch. “I worry what else you may be keeping from us about your biology.”

“Hmm, dear heart, she may be right,” Damien murmurs. “How can we know what to do if you do not tell us? And I suppose we may want to tell you of some more human features, in case you do not expect them…”

Arum rattles in amusement. “Honeysuckle, I assure you that I have grown increasingly familiar with your human biology over the past few years. I feel as though I have a clear grip for the moment. But I shall ask if need be.” He pauses for a beat, basking in the warmth of his spouses curled against him. “I suppose there are some things I ought to tell you, it is true. For example, have you ever heard of a parietal eye?”

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, many lizard species can drop their tails when they feel threatened. It's a way for them to distract a predator while they get away, which is exactly what Arum did here. And they do generally grow back, but only after a period of having an awkward little stump instead. Arum will have a goofy little nub for a while now.
> 
> A roc is a large bird of prey, originally from the Middle East. It was the closest thing to a hawk I could think of for a lizard of Arum's size.
> 
> A parietal eye is a third eye on top of the head of some reptile and amphibian species. Although they can't make out images, they can see light and dark. I also just think they're kinda neat.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed reading, and I'd love if you drop me a comment or kudos!


End file.
